Free Joy in His Heart by Kate Welsh Page B

lash out at him. Instead he’d helped her up, confirmed the bear cub as a possible danger, then whisked her away to safer territory.
    Brian’s reaction left her off balance and forced her to reevaluate everything she’d thought about him in the twelve years since they broke up. It didn’t take long toface the difficult truth. She’d been wrong about Brian for years. She didn’t know how she’d managed to convince herself that he was nothing more than an older version of the boy who’d tormented her half her life. But she had.
    She’d fallen in love with him before he’d even called a moratorium on that sort of behavior so she didn’t know how she could have been so blind. Blinking back tears that had little to do with her injuries, she stumbled to a stop and Brian reacted immediately.
    “Too fast?” he asked, clearly concerned.
    She shook her head. “I think I should try it alone for a while. This is…um…putting too much of a strain everywhere else.”
    Brian frowned, but nodded and handed her the crutch he’d so carefully constructed. “Just let me know if you need to stop, or go slower or if you need help,” he said and started forward alone, taking the lead, testing the footing on the trail. His strong back, his slightly too-long hair curling at his hairline, the way he moved along the path, snared her attention. Joy couldn’t seem to take her eyes off him. She stood watching as he moved away from her with sure-footed ease until she could see only the top of his head. With a sigh, she followed.
    Brian stopped once in a while to help her negotiate a difficult stretch of the trail, then let go without a word and started off alone again. After enduring the neutral look in his eyes for half the day, Joy came to understand the real source of her misery today where Brian was concerned. He’d been decent and solicitous, but he would do the same for any stranger. In fact, while practically glued to her side, he’d treated her exactly as if she were a stranger. It was as if that whirlwind courtship had never happened. They were now, at best, childhood adversaries who’d become a couple for a brief moment in time before going their separate ways.
    And that was the crux of the problem. Each act of kindness reminded her of all that might have been. The loneliness she battled each day was worse now because he was so near, yet so far. When he’d loved her, he’d done it in all the wrong ways but, at that moment, it didn’t seem to matter. Because if he was still the man she’d once thought him to be, then she’d lost him for the reason she’d always feared.
    She hadn’t been enough.
    He’d been wrong to demand she become someone she wasn’t and that usually made her angry. Today it only made her sad.
    Joy limped along determined to keep up. She wanted to get this forced togetherness over with as soon as possible. She carefully watched where she put her feet. Mooning over what might have been was futile and self-destructive, she lectured herself. What was important today was survival and continuing on. If she fell, they would probably have to stop for the day, so she was cautious and deliberate with her every step.
    Fighting a wave of exhaustion, Joy intentionally turned her mind to other matters. When she did, she felt an intense shame strike deep within her. Not once since waking, trapped and tangled in a tree with Brian for a rescuer, had she considered the reason they’d been out there in the first place. In her anger at Brian when hereturned to camp, she hadn’t even noticed when he’d mentioned them. The children.
    If she was afraid, how much more terrified were they?
    All she’d been thinking about was herself— her fear, her discomfort, her pain. She’d wallowed in self-pity and anger at Brian, never once examining the rest of the consequences of her failure as a searcher. She’d crashed and those children were still out there somewhere alone, maybe hurt and almost definitely afraid.